Post permalink

I've rarely had a problem with the quality of an OSS product; the issue is usually that the project gets abandoned.

But this can happen with commercial software, so ...

Yes, but if you're paying a company money, you have some kind of recourse on them to ensure that they patch their product and continue to support it whilst you keep paying.

Joe-in-his-bedroom has no real incentive to produce high-quality code, or to provide prompt patches or to support your product beyond a few weeks after it becomes business critical to your company.

Case in point: IE6 might be possibly the worst invention since sliced-bread, but it was absolutely business critical to a ton of organisations. It was supported by Microsoft for a full 10 years whilst they had 3 newer major versions available. Microsoft would still patch IE6 for critical updates long after Microsoft was actively telling customers not to use it.

The upshot of this was that companies for whom IE6 was critical, didn't have to fight the ideology of companies like Google who silently update, remove features, swap things around and generally play shenanigans with any business's attempt to script the browser or bundle it into business critical apps.

So yes, Chrome might be great for normal home-users, but it (and FOSS projects like it) are never going to be loved by enterprise in the way that IE is loved, because enterprise wants programs to be supported and reliable for as long as at all possible. Whereas FOSS developer like to change things, give users (rather than administrators) lots of customisations, like to support only the most recent version, and like having seamless, non-optional updates that make it incredibly difficult for large organisations to deploy.